Daniel Mason fans know what to expect from his new novel: the unexpected.

Mason’s last book, “North Woods,” set on the same spot in Massachusetts over the course of about 400 years, was my favorite fiction of 2023. It’s absolutely nothing like Mason’s Pulitzer Prize finalist story collection, “A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth,” which echoes the fantastic tales of O. Henry and Edgar Allan Poe, and absolutely nothing like his new “Country People.”

His latest is built for pleasure. It has a boisterous cast of two dozen or so characters, every one of whom is funny, means well and is trying to do what’s best (although many of them, including “hollow earthers” and organic farming cheaters, are wrong-headed at best). Its tone is bright and forgiving as a wayward academic named Miles moves, with his professor wife and their two small kids, from California to a town in Vermont.

It’s Mason’s first book that would not be categorized as historical fiction and I guess it does have one thing in common with his previous work: It is so willing to follow digressions and shaggy dog stories that it can feel, like “North Woods,” “A Registry” and other Mason works, somewhere in between a novel and a story collection.

The digressions include a charming peek into rehearsals of a grade-school production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” meetings with a group of locals who have very odd ideas about how the world works, talk-radio broadcasts, Miles’ multiple attempts to determine the subject of a doctoral dissertation he’s been working on for a dozen years and “Rat-Lines,” which are discovered in Miles’ family’s new home but about which the less said, the better.

To distract his children from the rat problem, Miles invents bedtime stories that incorporate and, he hopes, calm their fears. Storytelling is a major concern of “Country People,” which Miles narrates with a droll sense of wonder — as in a hike where he’s given a choice between learning about trees or hearing a probably fictional story about a K-pop star’s distress on a previous hike. Miles chooses the entertaining fiction.

Throughout the book, there is a sense of what a kindness it is when we distract/inform/delight each other with stories. The people in Miles’ group meetings may not all believe the outlandish things they say but “investigating” conspiracies makes them happy. Everyone knows “Midsummer” isn’t a true story but it contains truths about human behavior. And, although Miles doesn’t seem to clock this, the story he is telling us about his family works as a giant diversion from the dissertation that, as far as we can tell, he never writes a word of in the several months “Country People” describes.

It’s a mighty inviting book. Don’t expect much in terms of plot but do expect a big-hearted narrator whose wry sense of humor recalls a gentler David Sedaris and whose curiosity about the mysteries of his new home verges on childlike. The fairy tales he hears and tells nudge him in a healthier, more productive direction, a place where he comes to realize that “perhaps our world and our families are magical enough.”

Like everything else in “Country People,” it’s a small, even homey, revelation. But it’s also a great reminder that our lives are made up of stories that can be traced all the way back to the beginning of time. And that humans and the nature that surrounds us are not a bunch of small stories. We’re all one big story.

Country People

By: Daniel Mason.

Publisher: Random House, 310 pages.

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